


What Love Is

by rsadelle



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-11
Updated: 2012-03-11
Packaged: 2017-11-01 18:50:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/360082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rsadelle/pseuds/rsadelle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Molly meets Owen seven months after Sherlock jumps off the roof of the hospital.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Love Is

**Five Weeks**

Molly works in a forensics lab. Sometimes things come in where the chain of custody matters, and she has to personally sign for them. The envelope isn't from the Met, or from one of the private clients the hospital has. There's no name, nothing on the line for who had it last, no notes about what she's supposed to do with it.

She checks her email, in case someone realized they forgot to send instructions and sent them along later. The email is from an address she doesn't recognize, and it isn't signed:

> The soil is from Somerset. I need a list of the other compounds in the sample.

Molly spends most of her day on the analysis and sends back the list and her own thoughts on what they could mean.

Both the original email and her reply disappear as if they were never there.

*

**Seven Months**

"Excuse me."

Molly looks up from _Forensic Science International_. There's a nice-looking man with a laptop bag over his shoulder leaning over her table.

"It's just it's very crowded in here," he says, "and you don't seem like you'll mind if I just sit here and work without making conversation."

Molly looks around the cafe. It is rather crowded. She pulls her journal and her coffee back so she's only taking up half the table. "No, no, go ahead."

"Thanks." The nice-looking man smiles at her and gets out his laptop.

Molly goes back to her journal - there's an article about bacterial profiling in soil that she thinks she can use in the lab - but sneaks looks at the man every once in a while. What she can see of him around his laptop, anyway. He really is very nice-looking.

She's moved on to an article about the distribution of cyanide in bodily fluids when he closes his laptop and touches the top of her journal.

"I'm getting another cup," he says. "Can I get you something?"

"Oh," she says. "Oh, no, I'm fine."

"Are you sure?" he asks. "You did let me share your table."

It's been seven months since Sherlock, and longer since she's been on a date. "A coffee would be nice," she says, trying a smile that gets her one in return.

"Milk, sugar?"

"Two sugars," Molly says.

He comes back with two cups and gives her one.

"Thank you," she says.

"You're welcome." He smiles. It's still a nice smile. "I needed the break anyway."

Molly wraps her hands around her coffee cup. "I suppose I could use one. Can't read about forensic procedures all day." Even though that was her plan. Get out of her flat, learn something - she didn't become a pathologist just because she needed a job - do something other than think about how lonely and boring her life is.

He looks at the page she has the journal open to. "If you like them, you can. I'm Owen."

"Molly." Molly shakes his hand. "Nice to meet you."

*

**Nineteen Months**

Molly gets the email on a Thursday ten minutes before she leaves for the day. It's from a new address she's never seen before, and the subject line says, "I need you." She reads it, memorizes the instructions, and isn't the least surprised when it disappears.

She has a bag packed when Owen gets to her flat. He looks at it, looks at her, and says, "I thought we had plans."

"We did." Molly stands with her back against the door for a moment before she goes to him and meets his eyes. "I have to go. I need you to call me in sick tomorrow. I don't think I'll be gone longer than the weekend. I can't tell you anything else, and you can't ask me anything about it."

Owen meets her eyes for a very long time before he says, "Okay." He puts his arms around her. "Okay."

"Thank you," Molly whispers. Then she gives him the number to phone in the morning and kisses him goodbye.

*

There's a ticket for her when she goes to the window at the station and gives her name. She has to run to catch the train, but she makes it.

On the train, the conductor hands her an envelope. It has an address, and she gives that address to a cab driver when she arrives.

Sherlock opens the door before she even knocks. He's wrapped in a dressing gown. He shrugs it off when she comes in, and unpeels the bandage around his bicep.

"What happened?" Molly asks. He has a sterile kit waiting for her; she pulls on the gloves while she asks.

"I got shot." Sherlock sits very still.

Molly's relieved to find that the kit includes an anesthetic. She injects Sherlock and waits for it to take effect before she makes sure there aren't any bullet fragments left and stitches him up.

"You're going to need to be careful of this." Molly pats the tape and gauze into place. "You'll need some rest."

"Yes." Sherlock stands and twitches his dressing gown on. "I'll need you to monitor the experiment in the kitchen. I've written down the protocol."

He sleeps for sixteen hours. His protocol has a break long enough for Molly to spend the night on the sofa, and there's food in the refrigerator.

Sherlock wakes up while Molly is putting together a sandwich. She makes a second one for him. He eats it without speaking and checks on his experiment when he's done.

"I can keep watching it," Molly says. "You should get your rest. Let your body heal. I can stay."

Sherlock's eyes are tired, despite the sixteen hours of sleep. "You'll have to go back tomorrow."

"I can watch them until then."

Sherlock rubs his eyes, the most vulnerability Molly has ever seen him display, even when he was asking for her help, and goes back to bed.

Molly naps between continuing on with Sherlock's experimental protocols and cooking enough to leave him with leftovers. He needs food as much as he needs sleep.

"You can't give away anything about where you've been," Sherlock lectures when he joins her in the kitchen the next morning. "You have to be any ordinary woman on her way back to London. Throw away your ticket stubs at the station. Don't tell anyone you've seen me." He gets her return ticket out of a drawer. There's just enough time for her to get to the station.

"I left you some food," she says before he chivvies her out the door. "Eat it. Your body is healing. Try not to get shot again." She says the last with a smile that slides off at the look on his face. "You should say thank you."

He actually smiles at her for that, and does.

*

Molly brought a book and _The Journal of Forensic Sciences_ with her, so she reads all the way back to London. She has a pen, and scrounges up a napkin to take notes on a new protocol for the use of mRNA in body-fluid identification that she wants to try out in the lab.

She throws away the ticket stubs at the station, and by the time she gets on the Tube, it's almost as if she never left at all.

Owen's at her flat when she gets home, on the sofa with Toby on his lap and the telly on.

"No," she says when he starts to get up. "Don't." She drops her bag, her coat, her shoes by the door and goes to sit with him. She pets Toby. Petting a cat has been shown to lower blood pressure.

Owen puts his arm around her, and Molly turns her head into his shoulder and starts to cry.

He says, "Molly, love," but nothing else. No questions. Just him and her on the sofa with Toby taking off when her tears start to drip on him.

"Please," she says, "please, can we go to bed?"

"Yes. Yes, of course."

*

Molly wouldn't have noticed the car that's waiting for her when she leaves the hospital for lunch on Tuesday, except that the door opens and a voice she's only heard twice before says her name.

"Get in, Miss Hooper," Sherlock's brother tells her.

Molly does, because there's something about him that makes disobeying impossible. "Where are we going?"

Instead of answering her question, he hands her a file folder.

"What's this?"

"Read the file, Miss Hooper."

"It's Doctor Hooper," Molly says.

He barely smiles, and Molly opens the folder. Whatever she was expecting to see, it certainly wasn't a picture of Owen. She chances a look at Sherlock's brother. He looks pointedly at the folder.

Molly reads through the file. The first thing after the picture is Owen's military record, which only takes up a few pages. He's told her about some of that. The rest of the file is a thick sheaf of pages with blocks of text blacked out and the words "Security Service" at the top of every page.

Molly closes the file when she gets to the end and hands it back to Sherlock's brother. "What do you expect me to do now?"

"Do? I don't expect you to do anything." The car rolls to a stop, and Sherlock's brother gestures at her door. "I simply thought you should know."

Molly looks out the window. They're in front of the hospital. She says, "Thank you," because it seems like the thing to say, and gets out of the car.

She has exactly enough time to grab a sandwich from the canteen to take back to her desk.

*

**Two Years, One Month**

Molly and Owen are both laughing when they tumble into her flat, but the figure on her couch, blood spots on his shirt makes them stop.

"Is that your blood?" Molly asks Sherlock.

"Yes."

"Take off your shirt," Molly says.

Molly gets a bowl of water and clean flannels and comes back to find Owen sitting down next to Sherlock with her first aid kit. Molly sits on the other side.

"This is Owen. He was MI-5." She keeps talking even though both men still and stare at her. "Or is. I don't really know how that works. Can you leave MI-5?"

"Molly," Sherlock says.

Molly takes a deep breath. "He can keep a secret. That's all I'm saying. He can keep a secret."

"And I can do a field dressing," Owen says. "If it's all right with you."

Sherlock's body language changes and he sits back a little, leaving himself open. Molly and Owen each take a cloth.

"This one needs stitching," Owen says after a while.

Molly switches places with him. "This is going to hurt."

"It already hurts," Sherlock says, and then he sits in total silence while Molly stitches up his arm and Owen bandages his chest.

"Are you staying?" Molly asks.

"My temperature is elevated," Sherlock says. "I'm going to be feverish. Hallucinations and fever dreams are a possibility. It would be best if you could sedate me."

"I don't have anything," Molly says.

"I do," Owen says. "If you think you can trust me."

"If I couldn't," Sherlock says, "Mycroft wouldn't have let you get within fifty meters of Molly."

Molly cleans up, makes note of what she needs to restock in her first aid kit, and doesn't watch Owen get a sedative from somewhere in her flat. Probably his drawer in the dresser. It's his drawer; she doesn't touch it.

"This is going to take effect quickly," Owen says.

"Into bed then," Molly says, trying for brisk and efficient and probably only managing embarrassed.

Owen looks at her, but doesn't protest when she takes Sherlock's arm and helps him up.

"Owen is too large for both of you to fit on the couch," Sherlock observes.

"Owen has his own flat."

Sherlock doesn't quite laugh. "He's staying."

"He's unwieldy," Owen says to Molly. "You might need help."

"I move dead bodies all day at the morgue," Molly says at the same time Sherlock says, "That's not why you're staying."

There's a moment where Owen and Sherlock look at each other without speaking, and then Owen says, "Even MI-5 agents find affairs of the heart frightening."

Sherlock's lips twitch. "You do realize this means-"

"That one of us is going to have to share the bed with you? Yes."

Sherlock's eyes narrow at them. "Both, I think. Molly will want to keep an eye on me, and you won't want her alone with me, even sedated." Sherlock shrugs out of Molly's grip.

She lets Owen get him settled while she thinks about what neither of them said: that Owen's jealous, of Sherlock.

There isn't any other room, so they do all end up in her bed. Whatever Owen gave him has knocked Sherlock right out. Molly lies on her back between them, so she can see both of them in her peripheral vision.

Owen leans up an elbow over her. "How long have you known? About me."

"Ages," Molly admits. "That time I went away for the weekend." She waits for Owen's nod. "I went to see him. When I came back, his brother showed me a file about you."

"I've killed people."

"I know."

Owen's quiet for a bit. "Are you in love with him?"

Molly looks at Sherlock. "I was, a bit, once," she says. Then she turns away from him, toward Owen. "Now I'm in love with you."

*

Molly gets up and gets dressed when her alarm goes off in the morning, but she frets over breakfast, until Owen says, "Go to work. I'll stay here today."

"No," Molly says. "You go to work. I can call in." She reaches for her mobile to do just that, but Owen stops her with a hand on her wrist.

"I have my laptop. I already let my team know I would be working off-site today." He smiles a little. "It's good for them. They never know if I mean it or if I'm going to show up after lunch to check up on them."

"You don't have to do that."

"I know." Owen slides his hand down her arm to lace their fingers together. "But I will." He kisses her. "Go to work."

*

Molly goes straight home after work, to find Owen at the table with his laptop and Sherlock sulking - there's really no other word for it - on her couch.

"Do your dressings need to be changed?"

"Your boyfriend," Sherlock puts an unpleasant emphasis on the word, "already did that."

Molly looks between them, Sherlock smirking and Owen trying not to react, and decides she doesn't need to know how that went.

"Dinner, then," she says. She kisses Owen before she starts cooking. He closes his laptop not much later and helps.

"Not hungry," Sherlock says when there's more than enough food for three and plates on the table.

"You need to eat," Molly tells him. "Your body's injured and you've lost blood. You can't heal without fuel."

"I suggest you listen to her," Owen says. "She can be stubborn when she wants to."

Sherlock throws himself into a chair like a petulant teenager, but he also eats everything Molly puts on his plate.

"What are you doing in London?" Molly asks. "You don't have to tell me. I mean, I know you probably can't. But. It just doesn't seem safe."

Sherlock looks to the side. She doesn't know if he knows it, but it's a tell, even though she's not entirely sure what it's telling.

"I needed to see John." Hard on the heels of that, he says to Owen, "Molly seems to think she's made it clear to you that she loves you, yet you stayed here all day so I wouldn't be alone in her flat."

Molly holds her breath.

After a moment, Owen says, quietly and calmly, "Love makes fools of us all."

Sherlock gets up from the table and goes back to sulking on the couch.

Molly has no idea what Sherlock takes as a signal, but after a while, he throws himself off the couch and gathers his coat around him.

Owen says, "I'll start the washing up," and goes into the kitchen.

"He's your John," Sherlock says.

Molly's not sure quite how to take that. "He is?"

"He is."

There's a moment, where Sherlock looks at her, and Molly expects him to turn around and leave. "Try not to get shot or stabbed again," she says, halfway smiling at Sherlock.

"It was more of a slice."

Molly can feel her face fall, and Sherlock stills.

"I'll be as careful as I can," he says.

Molly nods. "You know where I'll be, if you're not."

Sherlock says, "Thank you," unprompted, and it keeps Molly from saying anything else before he leaves.

Owen rinses his hands when Molly goes into the kitchen, but he doesn't bother to dry them before he puts them on her. They leave handprints on her shirt that stick to her skin. She can still feel them even after the shirt is on the floor and her skin is dry.

*

**Two Years, Three Months**

Molly has a list, on paper because it's easier for her and Owen to add to in the kitchen, and she's hovering in the middle of Tesco scanning down it to see if there's anything she's missed.

"Molly?" John says.

Molly looks up from her list. He has a basket in one hand, almost empty. Beans, bread, milk. "John. Hi." She takes half a step toward him, and when he doesn't seem to mind, goes all the way and hugs him. "How are you?"

"Good," he says. "Yeah, good."

She doesn't have to be Sherlock Holmes to see it's a lie.

"How are you?" he asks her.

"Good," she says. She twists the list in her hand, and it catches his attention.

"You're," he says, looking at the right. "Are you?"

"Getting married." She holds up her hand so he can see the ring. "He's a good guy. No master criminals this time." She laughs a little. John doesn't.

"Right, well, congratulations."

"Thank you." Molly doesn't know what else to say to him. Their only connection was - is - Sherlock.

"Right," John says. "I should let you finish your shopping."

"Yeah," she says. "Yeah, okay."

He smiles, tightly, and walks away.

*

**Two Years, Eight Months**

Molly and Owen stand up in front of a reception hall full of friends already at tables - neither one of them needed a large, traditional wedding - and exchange vows and rings. Molly's so focused on Owen that she doesn't notice anyone else until later. Later, she wanders through the room, stopping to talk to people, getting ahead of or falling behind Owen. They always catch up to each other anyway.

Her smile gets even wider when she gets to the table Mrs. Hudson is sharing with Inspector Lestrade and a small handful of other people they both know.

"You crashed my wedding," she says to Sherlock.

"I did."

"I tried to talk him out of it," John says.

"No," Molly says. She accepts John's careful hug. "I would have invited you if I'd known."

"I wasn't sure I would be back in time," Sherlock says.

"I'm glad you were. When did you get back?"

"Night before last," Sherlock says. He leans forward and kisses Molly's cheek. "Congratulations. You look," he pauses before finishing with, "happy."

Molly feels Owen's hand on her back - it's why she didn't choose a heavy dress, she wanted to be able to feel his touch at their wedding - before Sherlock says, "Owen."

Owen shakes Sherlock's hand. "It's good to see you alive."

John looks between them but doesn't ask. Molly expects he will later.

"You'll understand," Sherlock says, "if I don't ask you to dance."

Molly turns into the arm Owen puts around her. "Yes," she says.

"No," Owen says. He presses his lips to her cheekbone. "Go dance with him. I'll get to know John."

Molly and Sherlock look at each other.

"Go on." Owen gives her a little push.

Sherlock takes her hand and leads her out onto the dance floor.

"I am glad you're back," Molly says.

"So am I." Sherlock isn't looking at her when he says it. He's looking at John and Owen, who are both watching them dance.

**Author's Note:**

> I pulled the technobabble from the abstracts for real forensic articles. This takes place in the future, so obviously Molly isn't reading these articles specifically, but perhaps there will be follow-up articles on the same topics. The articles I referenced, in the order they appear in the story, are:
> 
> Quaak FC, Kuiper I. Statistical data analysis of bacterial t-RFLP profiles in forensic soil comparisons. Forensic Sci Int. 2011 Jul 15;210(1-3):96-101.
> 
> Rhee J, Jung J, Yeom H, Lee H, Lee S, Park Y, Chung H. Distribution of cyanide in heart blood, peripheral blood and gastric contents in 21 cyanide related fatalities. Forensic Sci Int. 2011 Jul 15;210(1-3):e12-5.
> 
> Courts C, Madea B. Specific micro-RNA signatures for the detection of saliva and blood in forensic body-fluid identification. J Forensic Sci. 2011 Nov;56(6):1464-70.


End file.
